The Wesleyan Connection

Scott Vanek, academic computing manager for the Natural Sciences and Mathematics, teaches Wesleyan faculty, staff and graduate students how technology can best be used in their classes.

Q: Scott, when did you begin your Wesleyan career in Information Technology Services?

A: I arrived in mid-September 2008.

Q: You’re currently the academic computing manager for the Natural Sciences and Mathematics area. Do you generally support faculty?

A: Supporting faculty takes up most of my time. However, because grad-students work closely with faculty, I have also been supporting grad-students in certain situations. For example, a grad student may need assistance with Wesfiles or Blackboard and I would assist him or her. Additionally, I may also conduct specific training for a class of undergrads.

Q: Is supporting NSM any different than supporting say, the Arts and Humanities? Is there any science and match-specific software or hardware that you need to be familiar with?

A: Each discipline has its own specific (more…)

Rico Brogna, who had a nine-year career in Major League Baseball from 1992 through 2001, will rejoin the Wesleyan University football coaching staff as an assistant during the 2009 season. Brogna was an assistant football coach at Wesleyan during the 2004 season, handling receivers. His specific assignment for 2009 has not been determined, however, he will be on the offensive side of the ball, according to 18-year Head Coach Frank Hauser.

Playing with the Tigers, Mets, Phillies, Red Sox and Braves during his nine-year major league career, Brogna moved into high school football coaching for three years before joining the Wesleyan staff in 2004 for his first collegiate coaching experience. He went on to serve as head baseball coach at Post University and most recently as head football coach at Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury. Over the last five years, Brogna also has been part of the Arizona Diamondbacks organization as a pro scout.

“We are very happy to have Rico back on the football staff,” said Coach Hauser. “He did a fantastic job when he was here in 2004 and I welcome his football knowledge, vitality and love of the game. I look forward to working with him again.”

Wesleyan will begin its 126th season of football Sept. 26 when the Cardinals host Tufts University.

Masami Imai, assistant professor of economics, assistant professor of East Asian studies.

Masami Imai, assistant professor of economics, East Asian studies, is the author of “Ideologies, vested interest groups, and postal saving privatization in Japan,” published in Public Choice August 2008.

The privatization of Japan’s postal saving system has been a politically charged issue since it first started being debated in the late 1980s, and yet it provides a useful setting in which political economy of economic policy-making can be investigated empirically. Analyzing the pre-election survey of the House of Representatives candidates in 2003 and also the voting patterns of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) members on a set of postal privatization bills in 2005, this paper asks why some politicians fiercely opposed (or supported) privatization. (more…)

Meyer book

Priscilla Meyer, professor of Russian language and literature, is the author of How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, published in January 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press.

In How the Russians Read the French, Meyer shows how Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy engaged with French literature and culture to define their own positions as Russian writers with specifically Russian aesthetics and moral values. Rejecting French sensationalism and what they perceived as a lack of spirituality among Westerners, these three writers created moral and philosophical works of art that answered French decadence and “desacralization” with countertexts drawn from Russian literature and the Gospels.

Meyer argues that each of these great Russian authors takes the French tradition as a thesis, proposes his own antithesis, and creates in his novel a genuinely Russian synthesis rather than an imitation of Western models.

Gloster Aaron, assistant professor of biology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the co-author of “Statistical Significance of Precisely Repeated Intracellular Synaptic Patterns,” published in PLoS ONE 3(12): e3983, Dec. 19, 2008.

Lisa Dierker, professor of psychology, has received a $50,000 research grant from the Peter F. McManus Charitable Trust. The award will support her work focusing on individual differences in the development of addiction. This research is aimed at identifying youth at greatest risk for dependence at various levels of alcohol and tobacco exposure.